KOCHI: Aishu is worried sick about her brother. She has seen him injecting ‘some medicine’, his inner arm strewn with red needle trails. While whimpering to her best friend ‘is he about to die?’ the little girl hardly knows what’s in store for her. Her innocent world goes for a tragic spin when narcotics take over her brother, unleashing the beast in him. ‘Unfriend’, a short film by Lijin Jose, zooms into the dark zone of addiction and abuse.
The title is a term straight out of the cyberscape, an online jargon youngsters are quite acquainted with. “You can avoid unwanted elements with just a click in social networking sites. We unfriend people with negative vibes, but there are many other influences that need ‘unfriending’, says Lijin who has earlier made films like ‘Friday’ and ‘Law Point’.
The short film, made as part of an awareness campaign by KLM Foundation, follows two school-going kids. “Before starting the work I browsed through a number of other films exploring the same theme. They all had the same format - a detailed depiction of how an adolescent gets initiated into drugs, how the usage peaks to an alarming level and some advice,” he says.
‘Unfriend’ involves no graphic detailing of drug abuse, but some toned-down and effective visuals that imply the trauma. In the film you will find a teenager who is keen on hiding his geometry box and it’s through his glazed expressions you get a wind of what’s happening. “Instead of showing drug-taking teenagers and their euphoria in psychedelic colours I used the perspective of two kids. I think presenting substance abuse in a very tempting and stylised manner will have the reverse effect. So I tried to avoid such an exposure,” he says.
Very often substance abuse creates a vicious whirlpool sucking in many innocent victims. In the film it’s the little girl who falls prey to the the situation as she ends up abused. “Very often the ordeal is not limited to the addicts alone, friends and family members are also adversely affected. Students, parents and school authorities should work together to address this,” says Lijin. ‘Unfriend’ has its script penned by Shahina K Rafiq and music scored by Rex Vijayan. M J Radhakrishan has cranked the camera for the short which will be screened at schools across Kerala.
